A closer look at Britain’s latest Brexit gamble

The British are using the threat of a return to the Troubles to make the EU submit to changes to the Northern Ireland protocol. It’s a cynical, cruel, dangerous gamble, says Sean O’Grady, but it might work

Anti-Brexit protesters wave the flags of the UK, Ireland and EU outside parliament (Getty)

It is remarkable, given the disparity in their relative economic strength, that the UK has managed to squeeze as many concessions from the European Union as it has in the current round of the never-ending Brexit talks. The British government and its unionist allies in Northern Ireland have argued for many months that the EU’s fussy and legalistic implementation of the Northern Ireland protocol was making it unpopular and looking silly. The absurdities of the “sausage wars” symbolised an apparently petty attitude by the EU. The EU bleated about the integrity of the single market, but it was losing the argument in the court of public opinion. They were looking like the unreasonable ones, who didn’t comprehend the delicate peace in Northern Ireland. Somehow, they contrived to make Boris Johnson look sensitive.

Even so, the EU could have stayed firm; but they have caved in. Maros Sefcovic, a European Commission vice-president, has promised “very far-reaching” changes, and so they are. Tellingly he was even candid enough to reveal some of the tensions within the EU when he remarked that: “We have gone to the outer limits of what member states, particularly France, will wear.” President Macron is obviously angry and frustrated, not least about the Aukus “betrayal” and the treatment of French fisherfolk. The EU is abolishing about half of all of the remaining checks in response to British demands. In reality, they were probably also doing so to support the interests of a small member state, Ireland, with the Irish government so anguished about a return to violence in the north of Ireland. In any case, Johnson should be satisfied.

Yet, like all exercises in appeasement, it has only made the beast more hungry. Sensing weakness, the British in the prosaic shape of Lord Frost have been extending their demands, having drafted a new legal text of the protocol, taking the European Court out of its role in the single market, and requiring the EU to accept UK standards in their entirely, and presumably for all time, in Northern Ireland. Any risks to the integrity of the single market are then Europe’s problem, not Britain’s.

Will the EU give in again? It might, on pragmatic grounds. They might decide that they will put up with having a hole in the fence around the single market rather than putting a border up on the island of Ireland (or attempting to), and watching as the IRA and the loyalist gunmen pick up where they left off before the Good Friday Agreement. The British are using the threat of a return to the Troubles to make the EU submit. It’s a cynical, cruel, dangerous gamble, but it might work.

Or the EU might do what the French would probably like and retaliate, or threaten to, with tariffs, barriers and quotas on UK exports, on goods and financial and other services, which would inflict even more damage on the UK economy as it crawls towards recovery. The French could also restrict the supply of electricity to Jersey, withdraw cooperation on the migrant boats and allow their fishing vessels to blockade Channel ports. It would be the worst phase in Anglo-French relations since the Entente Cordiale of 1904, and possibly the Napoleonic Wars. Brexit is turning very nasty, if Paris says “non” to the British.